Court victory ... Terri Bruce and Thereafter, which has been taken off the market. Photograph: Amy Lundstrom

A fantasy author who claimed her editor made her sound like "an illiterate git" has stopped her publisher selling copies of her latest novel, after a judge agreed that it would damage her professional reputation as a writer.

Novelist Terri Bruce itemised 260 errors that she says were introduced to her novel Thereafter during editing and proofreading by her publisher Eternal Press, and claimed that this amounted to a breach of contract. The lawsuit between author and publisher was settled at County of Sonoma court, California, on 10 September, with rights in Thereafter and an earlier novel Hereafter, returned to the author.

In August Bruce won a temporary restraining order to halt digital and physical distribution of fantasy novel Thereafter, the second in her Afterlife series featuring ghostly protagonist Irene Dunphy. She moved to turn this temporary halt into an injunction, at which point her publisher agreed to settle.

Eternal Press refused to correct errors in the final proof that Bruce claims they had introduced, including grammatical mistakes and changes to the style and meaning of sentences. Specific errors were a loss of italics for internal thoughts, altering sentences beginning with "and" and "but", and what Bruce described as the "most egregious" error, wrongly formatting a letter that marks the emotional climax of the story.

"The publisher's version of Thereafter makes me sound like an illiterate git," Bruce wrote on her blog, going on to outline concerns over changes to the voice of the book:

"If I had meant that the cat started staring at Irene the moment she looked down, I would have written the sentence the way EP did," she explained. "However, what I meant, which is what I wrote, is that the cat was already staring at Irene, before she looked down. In the first sentence, the cat stares at Irene in reaction to her looking at it. In the second, Irene looks at the cat in reaction to it staring at her."

According to Bruce, the case turned in her favour after the judge who issued the restraining order agreed "that the continued distribution of Thereafter, for even another day, was too detrimental to my professional reputation to allow it to continue until the suit for breach is settled and that this harm to my reputation outweighed any adverse costs or loss to the publisher from not being allowed to distribute/sell the book," Bruce wrote on her blog.

Having won back the rights to her novels, the author is still considering whether to keep control of publication herself.

"My goal is to get both books back to market as quickly as possible while also ensuring the highest possible quality standards," Bruce said. She is looking for a new publisher but has "not yet ruled out self-publishing, either."